


Binary Sunrise

by atollon



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Character Study, Force-Sensitive Finn, Gen, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Slow Build, The Last Jedi but it's compliant with the plot of The Force Awakens (2015) dir. JJ Abrams
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-01
Updated: 2018-02-24
Packaged: 2019-03-12 10:25:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13545405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atollon/pseuds/atollon
Summary: For I shall come to rescue our name.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Rian Johnson can stuff it.

Luke looks across at the lightsaber that the kid, no older than he had been that sweltering, scorching, burning dusk on Tatooine when he had met Obi-Wan Kenobi and watched his aunt and uncle’s bodies turn to ash, holds out to him.

He looks and he feels such a wave, a torrent, of emotions, unstoppable, and most of all, he knows that she doesn’t deserve this burden.

When he sees the lightsaber, he is first thrown back to the prism-like, fluorescent black corridors of Cloud City’s power plant, to the moment Anakin Skywalker’s lightsaber sliced his hand clean off and sent the lightsaber and the hand that wielded it spiraling into the bottomless expanse below.

His mechanical hand, the artificial skin long-since worn away over three decades, twitches involuntarily towards the hilt that the girl holds out to him.

So he reaches out and takes the lightsaber from her, and there are the tears of an old man who has spent half of his life searching for peace for those who he’d loved in his eyes.

And as his hands, metal and weathered, warm and human, grip the worn metallic bodice, he thinks of the memory, of his first time, of activating the lightsaber in a ship travelling through hyperspace to a planet that no longer existed, a blast shield over his eyes, and being doubted by one of the only people he’d been able to trust.

_Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid._

Luke knows the answer to the question even before he can bring himself to ask it—he knows how the girl got onto the island, he knows the ship she took. He has seen that ship. He could try so hard, but in a thousand lifetimes, he could never forget it. He knows because he can feel the gaping emptiness, not in the Force, but in his heart. At the very center of his being.

“Where’s Han?”

The girl, eyes already red-rimmed with absolute exhaustion, is unable to stop the tears that ooze out and down her cheeks.

She is standing with her hands at her sides, empty now that he’s taken the lightsaber, her staff slung over her back, and she looks small, desperate, and terrified, but she stands straight and with purpose, absolutely proud, full of dignity and respect.

And Luke can’t look at her anymore, because he knows who he sees in her body language and who he sees in her hope and he can’t stand it, can’t stand the reminder.

He holds in his hands the lightsaber that Obi-Wan Kenobi had removed from an ancient trunk and handed to him, with allusions to tales and deeds of great glory.

It was the lightsaber that Yoda had examined when he’d first trained Luke, the lightsaber he’d carried around clipped to his belt more as a wishful thought than a weapon, that he’d summoned for the first time using the Force in the cave of the Yeti, after which he’d stumbled out, bruised and battered and—

He can’t go on.

The tears in his eyes are there, as he looks at the lightsaber, filled with memories and surrounded by the Force essence of those who had wielded it.

He cannot bear to part with it, yet he cannot bear to hold it.

“Han Solo is...is...he’s dead.” A ragged breath. “He was killed by his own son, Kylo Ren.”

The girl’s voice trembles with emotion, with pain and disbelief and unbridled fury, the memory and the feelings and the pain all still too fresh to be numbed and forgotten.

The tears slip past his eyes, too, and they roll down his face and gather in his beard like mourners.

He sets the lightsaber down gently onto the ground before his feet because he cannot bear the pain and deal with it all, at once and sudden and searing, and he has no more hubris left in himself to try.

The lightsaber glints in the sunlight as the Force in the blades of grass whispers around it, and, carefully, Luke steps around the lightsaber so that it no longer lies as a physical barrier, a crease in the Force filled with voices and stories and memories and experiences they do not share. He steps around its divide so that he can address her and ask her _why_ , because maybe, maybe, he wanted to be found.

He knows how she found him. The only way she’d gotten the map and that ship. Coincidence cannot be found within the Force.

He wants desperately to say no, to say _leave_ , but he can’t. He cannot be a coward and turn down a child asking for help, placing all her faith in him alone. Not again.

His voice still hoarse with disuse and broken with emotion, he asks, “Who are you?”

“I’m Rey,” she says. “General Leia Organa of the Resistance, currently stationed with its base on D’Qar, sent me to come find you. You left a part of a map inside an astromech droid, R2-D2, with a piece missing, and a Resistance pilot and a First Order defector–” she swallows, says their names, “Poe and Finn, they brought the rest of the map to the Resistance. And along the way, they found me. Or—” she stops, lost for a moment in a memory. “I found the droid.”

“Yes,” Luke takes another step forward, examines, analyzes the face he knows and remembers, the way to which he could have traced his path to along the stars, and asks, even if he knows the answer to this, too.

“But why are _you_ here?”

 

 

Poe sits, ragged and on edge, by the Medbay bed that holds Finn’s body.

Finn’s body is encapsulated in a bodysuit circulating bacta and pumping plasma into Finn’s bloodstream.

D’Qar’s energetic atmosphere is coming down from a high, the successful destruction of Starkiller Base a major victory for the Resistance, but it is washed out with grief over the fallen pilots and the murder of Han Solo.

And the critical condition of Finn.

Poe sews.

Kylo Ren’s crackling, unstable lightsaber had seared through and burned the leather jacket as it had drawn its blade of pure heat down Finn’s back, and because Poe knows there is nothing in the galaxy that he could possibly do at the moment to help Finn—because Maker, if there were, he’d already be doing it—he works on the jacket.

He does the stitches in thick leather cord, blue, for the lightsaber that Finn wielded in the battle against Kylo Ren, and blue for Blue Squadron, who he'd led to wipe out Starkiller Base in its entirety. They could not have done that without Finn.

Finn, who was the only reason Poe was still alive, who had risked his life to free Poe, who had broken through years and years of programming to do it, and who had risked his life again for Rey. Who had stood up to the man he feared and despised with a passion.

Poe’s hands shake when he thinks of Kylo Ren.

The industrial needle refuses to go through the leather, and Poe tries again, blinking the blurriness away.

He’d face Kylo Ren again for Finn, who’d had that courage.

He watches Finn’s vitals and works on the jacket.

 

 

“The First Order, led by Kylo Ren,” Rey starts, uncertain, “operated from a base known as Starkiller, which claimed outright responsibility for the destruction of the entire Hosnian System, including Hos Prime and its moon—” The words spill out, faster and faster in a torrent of information and memories as Rey’s words grow in urgency. “The destruction of the Republic’s capital has undoubtedly forced the Republic’s hand in joining the war, but General Organa doubts their interest in aiding the Resistance. So I came here—I was sent here to look for you—to convince you to help us again. We _need_ you, Master Skywalker. You’re our only hope.”

Luke is silent, and his eyes slide away from Rey’s piercing, questioning stare. Rey pauses.

_But why are you here?_

Rey looks at the ground where Luke set the lightsaber. “That lightsaber—I pulled it toward me, as I reached out and begged for it when I dueled Kylo Ren.”

She tilts her head back up to look Luke in the eyes.

“That lightsaber, it pulled me towards _it_ , where I found it in Maz Kanata’s castle on Takodana. It showed me—it showed me memories. _Your_ memories, I think. When I was captured by Kylo Ren, he tried to force his way inside my mind, but instead, I looked inside his. I asked a Stormtrooper to undo my restraints and leave his weapon beside me, and he did. When I fought Kylo Ren—he could not beat me.”

She pauses, for a breath. For any reaction. “That is the Force, isn’t it?”

“As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were silenced.” Luke looks sadly past Rey’s head—at the blurred shape of the Millennium Falcon, Rey realizes—then turns to again meet Rey’s eyes.

“Yes, that is the Force. But I cannot be your last hope.”

Rey continues to look at him, unmoving, eyes desperate.

“I will train you in the ways of the Force, but not in those of the Jedi.” The weight of each of Luke’s words is palpable. “There are no Jedi on this island.”

 

 

Hux collapses onto his knees and slides forward before keeling over to lie prostrate before the looming hologram of Supreme Leader Snoke.

“Can you explain,” Snoke says quietly, coldly, his voice grating and dangerously detached, as Hux feels his pharynx contract, “what catalyzed the circumstances of Starkiller Base?”

Hux wheezes pathetically, unable to speak an answer, but Snoke doesn’t need that either—unsympathetically, he rips his way into Hux’s mind, and Hux’s wheezing breaths turn into gurgling screams.

“I see,” Snoke says after a while, voice laced with anger and contempt, and leans contemplatively against the back of his holographic throne.

Hux’s weak whistle-breaths turn into full-fledged coughs as Snoke releases him and he is allowed to collapse onto his side.

“The responsibility for sending Ren out of commission with his face carved in half is attributed to that _girl_.”

At his feet, Hux retches air.

“ _FOOLISH_ ,” booms Snoke suddenly, his voice rolling across the dark chamber. “All this time you’ve been focusing on that girl—you have overlooked, in your tunnel-vision hatred, blindness, and stupidity, the existence of _another._ He has been under your upturned noses for the past fourteen years, because you’ve been too proud to look down.”

Hux wheezes, managing to breath out “Who?”

Snoke ignores him, steepling his twisted fingers, with their blackened, claw-like nails, underneath his deformed skull as he sits, lost in thought.

“I cannot feel him now—I cannot find him. He is too far away, shrouded in the Force by those around him. But no matter. I will find him soon enough. And he will be our path to the pitiful remains of that rebel scum that calls itself the Resistance. _And this time—_ ”

Hux rises silently above the ground, his feet dangling several inches above the polished black floor.

“ _—you will not fail me._ ”

Hux drops back onto the ground at the hologram’s feet.

“Now, go evaluate Ren. Determine how long before he’s in the condition to see me.”

Hux barely manages to gasp out, “Yes, Supreme Leader,” before the hologram blinks out.

 

 

Far below, the choppy waves on the endless sea of Ahch-to splash against the dark of the cliff face.

Luke looks at the lightsaber, resting on the slab of rock in front of Rey’s crossed legs, the hood falling back over his face, pushed by the wind that flows across the cliff face and through the hollow cavern. “The last Jedi ceased to be thirty years ago. Now, there is only hope.”

Luke searches Rey’s eyes for understanding.

“The Jedi came to an end after the death of Darth Vader and the Emperor, the last living Sith. There is a principle that must be understood: without the strength of the light, there cannot be darkness. With the balance, the First Order only played at the fear that lies coiled in our hearts and in the shadows. I did not teach Jedi. I taught balance.”

He pauses and keeps searching. He sees the beginning of understanding in her clear eyes and steadfast gaze.

“There exists a bridge. There always has. An allegiance to neither the Jedi nor the Sith. The Gray. The Jensaarai. The Imperial Knights. They have existed for millenia, only to be erased from our history.

“For years after the collapse of the Empire, I tried to embody the balance. Yield neither to the dark nor the light. And to teach those principles to the generations of Force-users who studied under me. The balance—it is like a coin, set to spin but that ceases spinning on its edge without falling to show either face and hide its opposite.”

“But how can the universe be in balance when there exists someone as horrid and vile—and _powerful_ —as Kylo Ren?” Rey asks quietly. “How can you keep the balance when a side is trying to to topple the coin onto one face and hide the other?”

“It is my own pride that led to what became Kylo Ren,” he says simply, as if that explains everything in the galaxy. “I was not enough to keep the balance.”

The wind scrapes across the bare rock.

“We must find the light to counterbalance the darkness. But,” he turns to Rey, who sits cross-legged on the slab of rock, listening intently, “once—once this is over, you _must_ relinquish the light and find the balance. Without you—"

Without the wind, there would be silence.

"The strength of the darkness is counterbalanced by the strength of the light, but the same can be said for when the opposite happens. The existence of the Jedi facilitates the existence of the Sith.”

He turns away from the water and looks past Rey, towards the reflecting pool within which there is a tiled tribute to the two sides of the Force, the dark and the light.

“It is time for the Jedi to end.”

He heaves a long sigh, then makes his way back along the jutting rock orifice to stand at eye-level with Rey as she sits.

“Alright. Open your hand.”

She complies, splaying her right hand open in front of her.

He reaches forward and presses a druggat into her palm.

“Spin it,” he says simply, and Rey complies, sending it turning round and round on the rock slab in front of her, between herself and the lightsaber.

“Now focus,” he says. “Focus, and make it so that it stops spinning on its edge.”

Rey eyes him, almost as if about to protest about the difficulty of the exercise.

The glimmer of a smile cracks Luke’s façade. “You have the Force, do you not?”

She tilts her head to watch as the druggat spins, concentrating. As it slows, her gaze intensifies, and the druggat remains upright, still turning round. Its rotations become slower and Rey instinctively leans forward to amplify her focus.

Luke stops her gently with a hand on her shoulder. “Close your eyes.”

“But then I won’t be able to see the coin!” Rey protests, and the druggat wobbles dangerously. Luke gives her a pointed look.

With the utmost care, she straightens, and slowly shuts her eyes.

The coin keeps turning. Slower. And slower.

And slower.

And it stills.

Balanced perfectly on its edge.

Rey opens her eyes warily, joy flashing across her face as she sees the coin, recognizing that it is still upright, and stationary, on the rock before her.

“See?” Luke says, almost poignantly, raising an eyebrow. Gently, he picks up the coin by its two faces and returns it to the confines of his robe.

“Now close your eyes.”

Rey complies, and holds out her hand expectantly for the coin.

Luke sighs. “No.” He curls her hand back closed, and she frowns.

“Now, reach out. With the Force. And find that same balance.”

Rey sucks in a sharp breath through her nose, squeezing her eyes tightly shut.

“Breathe,” Luke says softly. “Just breathe.”

Little by little, Rey’s face relaxes.

“What do you see?” Luke’s voice grounds her.

“I see the island, shrouded in the Force.” Her eyes flit behind her eyelids. The grass and the flowers flash across her vision, dancing in the wind that flows around the island.

“At the center of the island, there is a tree.” She stands before it, traces the grooves in the ancient trunk with her fingers. At her feet, the grass continues to rustle, rippling out in all directions from where she stands. “The light.”

“The last-standing Jedi Temple, with the original Jedi texts,” says Luke.

“And below that tree, directly underneath, there is a—a cavern. A hole in the rock by the water. There’s darkness…” A gaping maw of a fracture in the rock, overgrown all across by inky seaweed that seems to ooze out of the opening like sludge. Rey kneels and feels the texture of the seaweed, and it’s rough and scratchy, enough to make her palms raw and red.

“And between them?” Luke asks, unyielding, as Rey looks over the precipice.

“This rock ledge—this hollow. You.” Luke is blinding, as if he is the solid weight around which the light and the darkness revolve. Whose energy rolls off of him in waves and shines like sand in one of Jakku’s sandstorms under the two full moons, pulled by an unseen magnetism. Looking at him in the Force is almost nauseating, and she fights to stand her ground against the rushing currents that swirl around him.

“There is—there is balance.”

“Can you see yourself?” Luke asks.

Rey blinks several times, her eyes still closed, and reaches out with her heart. She sees Luke again, the steadfast backbone of the tipping scales. As she mentally steps back, feels across the island, she is almost overwhelmed by the processes that the island encompasses. Life. Death and decay, which in turn, feeds new life. Warmth. Cold. Peace. Violence.

And between it all, balance.

She sees herself, sitting at the heart of the balance. At the divide of dark and light.

That same Force, inside herself.

“Yes,” she whispers.

“Can you see beyond yourself? Can you _feel_ beyond the island?”

Rey makes herself reach again, reach out, beyond the familiarity of the Force of the island, beyond the endless sea, beyond the planet.

The voices, the minds, wash into her consciousness, whispering in thousands of languages around the stars like rushing water directly behind the back of her head, just out of reach.

“The Force surrounds us.” She hears Luke’s voice as if through a busted comm, resonating at the base of her skull. “And the Jedi and Sith trained to manipulate it with their will. But the Force is not a _power_ unique to those who have learned to wield it.

“The Force is in all matter, living or not, and it is those who _understand_ it that can _shape_ it, and subsequently, the world around them. Millenia before the Jedi and the Sith came into existence, the Force had been there, and it will remain long after we are gone. It is not restricted to the use of Jedi or Sith.”

Rey feels the light breeze that gently buffets the cavern orifice on her skin. In the same way, she feels the trillions of souls as they buffet her in the currents of space and time. It’s dizzying. It’s fascinating.

She no longer feels alone.

“Surely,” she says, and her own voice is distorted in her head, “there must be others in the galaxy that possess this p—that can sense the Force and—and _understand_ it.”

“Yes,” Luke answers softly, his voice flowing across star systems and resounding back on Ahch-to, and turns to the water, watching the two setting suns.

“I know of another.”

The lightsaber rattles on the rock in front of her, jittering from the energy. Around her, small pebbles tremble as they rise from their resting place on the rock slab and float.

Suddenly, she is standing in her memory, beside a cot. She can feel him, can feel his calm, cathartic presence.

She breathes out.

“Finn!”

  
  


Finn opens his eyes.

 


	2. Chapter 2

The impact and initial shock of being awake, of suddenly surfacing from the deep recesses of his mind, from suspended stasis, is overwhelming to all of his senses.

Finn has a strikingly clear memory of the last thing that flashed across his eyes before the darkness of unconsciousness had swallowed him whole—Kylo Ren, vicious, swinging his hissing, angry, volatile blade. The searing, scorching-hot fire that lit up across his back, and Ren’s immediate attention shift to Rey.

To Rey, whose head had hit the trunk of one of the towering, frost-covered trees and who had crumpled limply in the snow.

“Rey!” Finn shouts instinctively, because he is still living the moment, and bumps his forehead against the gelatinous casing of his med-cot.

The movement sends that fiery, red-hot pain across his back, and he feels it in every nerve along his spinal column. It pulls him sharply towards reality.

The image of Kylo Ren fades from the back of his eyelids, and he regulates his breathing.

He is no longer in the forest.

Beside him, he _feels_ rather than sees someone move.

“Finn! Finn, can you hear me?” The voice is scratchy from sleep or disuse, coming from the left side of the room, and achingly familiar.

Poe.

And the accompanying rapid two-tone beeping—BB-8.

He is no longer in the forest.

Poe scrambles up to his cot, into his field of vision, hair slightly out of place, worry lines across his forehead and knitting his brows together, but his eyes shine with unabashed happiness and—

And relief.

Poe takes care to unclasp the gelatinous hood with all of Finn’s vitals, like the hatch of the cockpit of an X-wing, and opens it up.

Finn looks up Poe’s face, whose relieved expression is unguarded, face framed by the dim ceiling lights of what Finn presumes is a Medbay, turning his curls into a luminous halo.

He is momentarily distracted. He is floating. Around him, reality feels fuzzy. Draped in a gossamer of filmy, translucent light.

“Finn—” Poe is almost breathless, with that same floating feeling, his eyes flitting across Finn’s face in turn. “You must have so many questions—”

_He is no longer in the forest._

“Where’s Rey?” Finn manages, his mind pulled sharply back to the present, his own voice soft with lack of use.

 _For how many days_ , the thought crosses his mind suddenly, and his heartbeat quickens. His concentration starts to float again.

Something about Poe shifts, almost imperceptibly, maybe from surprise, but Finn was trained to notice and learn to read body language in people whose faces he could not see, so when Finn looks at Poe’s hands, the change in looseness of their grip of the med-cot, and how his head dips in surprise, that is enough. But that smile, that pure joy and relief, that energy, is all still there.

“Buddy—I don’t even know where to start. Firstly, and I know you’re going to ask, but there’s no need to sweat about her safety—she’s fully up and operational after the spat you had with K—”

Poe chokes on the name.

The change is in his posture now. In the way his muscles tense, in the way his balance shifts. Finn is keenly aware of it all, in this strange, suspended state. Poe almost crumples into himself, with one objective: _protect, protect, protect_.

Finn blinks against the heaviness of his eyelids, and that change is gone, is remedied, too.

“Ren. She’s gone to find the Jedi Master Luke Skywalker using that last bit of recovered map. That you helped deliver here, to the Resistance.” Poe frowns, worry lines deepening. “You do remember that, I hope. Do you remember—”

“Yes,” Finn confirms. He knows what Poe almost asks. “I remember. You let me keep your jacket.”

Poe’s eyes widen a little, and then they soften. Finn feels their warmth prickle across his skin, beneath the layers and layers of bacta in the suit. His gaze involuntarily drifts to where the mended jacket is hanging on one of the hard chairs, beside the one in which Poe had been dozing.

In the back of his mind, Finn realizes that Poe has been here for almost as long as Finn has, completely of his own volition.

“Rey isn’t here…” Finn trails off, half-closing his eyes. “I could have sworn she’d been at the side of the bed only a moment ago—right across from where you’re standing.”

Poe shifts by the bedside, momentarily at a loss for something to say. BB-8 beeps something at him, too fast for Finn to catch, but Poe shushes it, nudging BB-8 with his shin.

“Sorry,” Finn says after an unnatural silence, occupied only by the hum of the Medbay’s lights, all too familiar for comfort. He gestures at the bodysuit in which he is encased, rotating his wrists weakly. “It must be whatever’s in this.” He closes his eyes and grins ruefully. “I’m saying everything I think the moment I think it.”

That isn’t completely true. Finn keeps his observations about how Poe reacts to himself, about how he does it as discreetly as possible, without voluntarily drawing attention.

The joke falls a little flat, but Poe laughs, almost despite himself. Finn is glad for that—the statement wasn't an invitation for pity. “We all get like that sometimes. You didn’t see Testor that time she snapped her tibia and got put on phosovane.”

Finn relaxes and lays back down on the cot, blinking up at the ceiling as more memories start to trickle back.

He _remembers_.

Even though his back screams in protest, he shifts across the bed and turns onto his side, facing Poe, wide-eyed. “Starkiller Base! Did we– did we–”

He’s almost afraid to ask, almost afraid that speaking his _wish_ aloud will jinx or undo the indisputable victory of the Resistance, cemented by Poe’s unwavering presence at Finn’s bedside.

Poe raises his eyebrows and runs his hand down his face, caught in the memory. “We did it,” he says. Straightforward and unshakable truth.

He makes eye contact with Finn. “We definitely couldn’t have done it without you.”

Finn opens his mouth to protest, resisting the urge to shift under Poe’s sincere gaze, but Poe shakes his head to stop him. “Getting us onto there. Disabling the shields. Battling Ren. That was all you.”

“In the forest,” Finn asks, now more curious than the kind of anxious that makes his skin crawl, knowing that Rey is safe and Ren is at least temporarily neutralized, “what happened?”

Poe breathes out. “I don’t think I’d do... _whatever did_...justice. I don’t even know the whole story,” he confesses. “Rey debriefed straight to the General after we got you to the Medbay here on base. I know she managed to fend off Ren, and she brought you safely aboard the Falcon.”

Finn brings one hand gently upward, covering one side of his face and letting it rest there. The shuffle of the bacta suit disguises the silence. “Do you know, if– if Rey forgives me?” he asks suddenly.

Poe frowns, shifting his weight from one leg to the other. “For what?”

“That I couldn’t do it—couldn’t fend off Ren long enough—that _this_ ," and he gestures, suit crackling with emphasis, "is what happened to me when I tried?”

The shame is sudden too, as Finn is viciously swept back to years and years of training he was forced to undergo as a cadet. And that had been the best he could do? After everything?

“Finn,” says another voice, so sudden, self-assured, and powerful, so _reminiscent_ , that Finn jolts straight up despite everything in his body that screams in protest and pain. Poe swivels around.

The door to the small medroom is open, and the General stands in the doorway. Calm, collected. Entirely unobtrusive despite the situation. “If you hadn’t done what you did, neither Rey nor you would have lived through that day.”

There is a beat of silence as he and Poe take in the General’s presence and her words.

Aware of her effect, she leans a little further into the room, barely through the doorway. “I’m very grateful and extremely relieved that you are awake, Private Finn. Commander,” she inclines her head towards Poe. “If you wouldn’t mind stepping out for a moment? I’ve alerted Dr. Ukobaa that Finn is awake, and she can help him out of the medical equipment.”

Poe glaces at Finn quickly, and Finn gives him an almost imperceptible nod before he knows what he’s doing. Herding BB-8 in front of him, Poe hurries out of the medroom after the General.

 

Dr. Ukobaa helps Finn sit up, folding the bed up to its maximum and then slowly, gingerly, helping him pull himself completely upright. She helps him stretch and work his legs, helps him stand, and leads him carefully to the cylindrical fresher located in the corner of the room. She releases all of the pressure knobs on the suit that he can’t reach, and leaves a fresh set of clothes on a shallow shelf curtained off with a thick, clear, and waterproof canvas inside the fresher.

Inside the cylindrical chamber of the fresher, Finn works open the remaining pressure knobs and lets the bacta suit drop, stepping out of it stiffly. He sets the fresher to sonic, because he doesn’t want to prolong the sensation of hot water against his back, but it’s still too long.

The feeling leaves his jaw clenched and teeth grinding some time after the water jet passes and dissipates.

Reaching for anything _hurts_.

Moving his arms hurts and stretches the sensitive skin of his back. It takes concentration, deep breaths and projected artificial serenity to let go of the pain.

He proceeds carefully, bending at the waist or bending his legs as an alternative to arching his back. The pants that he slowly, excruciatingly slips into are soft and fit him loosely, and Finn likes the feeling. It’s very much different from the black, skin-tight thermals troopers were given to wear beneath their armor. Compared to this, they were suffocating.

He doesn’t try working on the shirt—he grants his body reprieve, standing motionless for a count of one hundred before leaving the fresher to soothe his back and wait for the burning pain to ease—and takes it with him, sliding open the fresher door and stepping barefoot onto the cool tiled floor.

“I'm really sorry,” he says to the medic, swiveling as gently as he can back towards the fresher. “I left the bacta suit inside—I couldn't reach to pick it up.”

Dr. Ukobaa shakes her head in understanding. “Definitely—you shouldn’t even have troubled yourself. They’re one-use, anyway.” She looks up at him from a data pad and one side of her mouth tilts up in a crooked smile before she crosses the room to support him back to the med-cot, where she helps him back down onto the edge of the bed.

Finn thinks of the routine medical examinations cadets and troopers were forced to undergo with the First Order. _Are._

She runs two fingers experimentally along the scar on his back.

The feeling sets Finn’s bruised skin aflame; the contact feels _wrong_ —like the hard knock of teeth together and the subsequent ringing echo in his ears, like pieces of stormtrooper armor still too large to fit properly grating against one another as he’d walk, like the ugly crackle of Ren’s lightsaber. Like a dry, bone on bone crunch.

He purses his lips until he can’t feel the muscles in the sides of his mouth.

 

The General fixes Poe with a look he’d seen her give Han Solo after he’d said something she’d deemed particularly ridiculous or self-jeopardizing. He hasn’t said anything yet.

She smiles a hidden smile, full of concealed meaning. “It’s all in your eyes, Commander Dameron,” she says, with a small sigh, before he has a chance to ask.

“Poe,” the General says, quieter, and there’s warmth and concern in her voice. “Ten days. It’s been ten days, and you’ve gotten yourself worried sick. You can’t go walking around—I can’t, and won’t, have you walking around—like you’ve been sleeping on death’s porch for the past two weeks.” Her brow furrows, and her eyes grow increasingly worried.

“The Resistance needs you, Poe. _I_ need you. If the First Order shows up, we need to be capable of action.” Her voice grows soft. “I love you, Poe, but _please_ take care of yourself.

“You haven’t slept. You’ve barely eaten. Poe, I know you know, and you have to understand, but I know what it’s like, what that feeling of fear, gnawing your heart raw and leaving you empty, is like. What it does to you. You’re right, Poe. You were right to worry.”

She makes a move as if to reach up towards his face, in an almost motherly gesture, to tilt it toward the light and examine the deep lines of worry now etched into his skin, years too early.

She doesn’t, only looking at him with the most soulful eyes Poe had yet to see in a person since his mother’s death.

Poe shifts on his feet, rubs the bridge of his nose.

“I know you’re perfectly capable, Poe,” the General says, in complete earnest, “but sometimes, we all need a reminder, a slap in the face, if you will, to remind us not to neglect _ourselves_ , too, in the process of the cause. So,” the ghost of a grin breaks across the General’s face. “Verbal slap. You can use your imagination for the physical contact.”

Poe can swear on Black One that he feels the ghost of a tap across his right cheekbone, and he blinks in surprise. There is a glint in the General’s eye.

The door to the ward hisses open, and the medic beckons the General inside.

 

She walks in, followed uneasily by Poe.

Finn sits on the cot, clothed in a fresh, loose tan shirt and a pair of gray pants. He stands to attention hesitantly, movements still stiff and slightly unnatural, unsure of how formal his actions should be given the situation.

The General waves the formalities off with a frown, and Finn lowers himself hesitantly back onto the med-cot, to his own immense quiet relief.

Behind the General, Poe lingers uncomfortably, his body language unconsciously projecting the feeling of being slightly out of place. Trying to inconspicuously gather himself and his non-existent belongings from the room, and at the same time almost looking for a reason to stay.

But mostly, he’s trying to keep BB-8 behind his legs, whose interest appears to be solely in remaining in the room.

The General turns, catching on. “Oh, stay, Commander Dameron. Ten minutes won’t change anything now. That is, of course,” she turns back to Finn, “if you feel comfortable with that, Private.”

Poe’s presence is immensely reassuring. It takes off a little of the edge of having a private, one-on-one conference with the General. Finn nods.

Poe stays, perching hesitantly back on the chair where he’d spent the last ten of his days and nights, and Finn, briefly following the movement, reflexively snaps back to attention when the General’s eyes remain on him.

“Oh, stop that,” she chastises. “We are among people who have equal respect for one another. There is no need to treat me any different.”

Finn shifts on the cot again, trying to induce artificial relaxation.

“How do you feel, Finn?”

Finn tries to ease the tension from his shoulders and give a direct, truthful answer. “I feel capable, General. Inured to the discomfort.” He breathes. “Ready for combat.”

Behind the General, Finn can almost feel Poe’s heart jump to his mouth.

The General gives him a look and turns to the medic.

“How is his physical condition, in your opinion, Dr. Ukobaa?”

Dr. Ukobaa looks hesitantly between Finn and the General, takes a breath, and starts.

“The lesion is large in surface area, but it is not nearly as deep as it is bruising on the surface. The majority of the damage lies along the dermis. In fact, based on Rey’s account of her duel with Kylo Ren, I would say that she produced the opposite effect on him.” She winces, belatedly realizing. “My apologies, General.”

The General gestures for her to go on.

“On one hand, the shallowness is good.” She looks at Finn. “It minimized the injury to and subsequent stress on your spinal column, which saved your life. However, the location of the burn and the amount of skin cells lost to the laceration makes for a painful recovery. As you know, I’ve coated your back with bacta gel—it should accelerate your cell production and rehabilitation, but it is imperative you apply it daily. And while it may seem counterintuitive, I would also recommend a light physical training and stretching regimen in order to help the newly-forming tissue on your back gain elasticity and durability.”

She flips through several screens on her handheld data pad. “Given your history of intense cardio and muscle training, I would recommend re-establishing at least part of that routine to help your body cycle back into functionality.”

Finn acknowledges Dr. Ukobaa’s statements, his sense of detachment from his body only growing. Feeling the intense gaze of the General examine him.

The General nods at Dr. Ukobaa, who steps outside.

“Private Finn,” she says, in the quietest voice he’s heard her use, so different from the voice she uses when addressing Resistance leaders and organizing rebels. “You have to promise me something—it is something that takes reminding, and reminding.” She glances over her shoulder at Poe, sitting with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands on one of the two chairs, next to the chair across which he's draped his jacket. Finn's jacket.

“You must not put the value of the Resistance above the value your own life.”

Finn opens his mouth partly from shock, partly to protest, to argue.

“I don’t want you to see us as the kind of people that would require that of you. We all made, and continue to make—” she pauses, takes a deep breath, and closes her eyes momentarily, to keep the tears at bay, “—to make sacrifices for the Resistance.”

Finn feels her grief, coiled at her feet and kept at bay by her incredible strength.

“But your life is the most precious thing you have—it is the biggest sacrifice, the last option. What good is hope, what good is the Resistance, without people to carry on with it? Your life is the most powerful sacrifice—save it. Everyone finds the place to make their difference. It is dangerous, the place where selflessness and recklessness overlap.”

She looks at Finn with the eyes of one of the most powerful people in the galaxy.

Finn swallows and breathes out. Forces his heart to slow its anxious rhythm. “I understand, General.”

The General’s gaze is meaningful. She looks at him, as if she knows and expects the question that he is burning to ask.

“What happened on Starkiller?” Finn almost whispers.

“Starkiller.”

The General clasps her hands in front of her and looks at them as she composes herself.

“After Kylo Ren took out you out, Rey managed to engage him in a duel. As per mission parameters, Blue and Red Squadrons, under Commander Dameron,” she inclines her head, “were coming in to detonate the thermal oscillator after Chewbacca set off the munitions. Detonating the oscillator caused the entire planet to split apart at the very core, creating fractures on the surface. As they fought, one of those fractures split the forest of Starkiller in half, separating him from Rey. With the oscillator detonated, both squadrons were instructed to return to base, while Chewbacca took the Falcon and searched for you and Rey.”

She takes a breath. “The 7G Sector in which Starkiller Base was located is now a binary system. After the planet core's implosion, the planet itself exploded out into a star. Nothing of the original planet remains.”

Finn takes a moment, silent, envisioning the events as they happened. Piece by piece.

The more the news of the destruction of Starkiller settles into his mind, his feeling of absolute freedom, of elation, coupled with a heavy, unshakeable pain, amplifies.

Starkiller. The name itself. Dreaded. Ruinous.

A place he knew from his earliest memories. A planet he was glad to have escaped, first to run routine, mind-numbing patrols on the Finalizer and _really, truly, finally_ escaped, after Poe pulled the TIE-fighter free and the Finalizer fell into the surrounding darkness behind them.

Yet that pain, washing over his bones, decidedly separate from the persisting pain in his back. The C-Corps, F- and H-Corps. All nameless soldiers. All afraid.

All gone.

Finn thinks, as the surroundings of the medical ward blur in and out of focus, about whether their deaths were ultimately the better option, about how they were within the grasp of the First Order beyond saving. About how, in his life among the cadets and the troopers, death would have felt like a dream if considering it were not so explicitly self-piteous. If it had not been so selfish to want it.

His eyes prickle where he can’t reach to rub the sensation away. They weren’t really nameless—Zeroes, Slip, Nines—but they were without identity. Raised, trained to be moldable and controlled. Just like him.

There is nothing that separates him from them.

Except that they are gone now, and that he sits on a med-cot in a brightly-lit room surrounded by the people who have made his life part of theirs. Except that he made the choice to act when they didn’t, made the choice to tell a pfassking, mutli-colored lie and lead Poe away, _out out out_. Made the choice to undo those restraints, sit as the gunner. Shoot at those ion cannons.

Keep the jacket. Stay.

Personal strength. Impersonal fear. All were a factor in the choices that they made.

_Made the decision not to open fire._

The room is still with silence unbroken. Finn swallows the lump in his throat.

“Thank you for telling me, General.”

The General nods without speaking. It is startling, almost, the way she is capable of translating wholehearted empathy into a single look, brimming with emotion. Finn thinks that this is perhaps what makes her one of the most formidable military leaders, and such a fierce politician back in the days when they were not yet superfluous.

There is another beat, marked not even by BB-8’s quiet beeping.

“Private Finn,” the General asks evenly, “in which division of Resistance forces would you be willing to work in?”

The question takes Finn by surprise.

Phasma had trained the FN Corps to be the most elite squadron of stormtroopers within the First Order standing army. They were everything short of Special Corps.

Trained in standardized ICE, as well as Echani, Stava, Petranaki, Gand, and Bakuuni Hand—something Phasma had taught them despite direct orders not to—with knowledge of a variety of defensive and offensive hand-to-hand combat positions from across the galaxy. Taught to operate heavy blaster pistols, all military-type, and every variation. An effective grasp of every lethal and non-lethal combination in combat with a baton.

“He’s one hell of a gunner,” says Poe quietly. Finn starts out of his introspection.

The General’s eyes soften. “Private, would you be willing to be a gunner in the Resistance fleet?”

Finn considers his knowledge of weaponry working on power cells.

He knows that one thing he is _not_ is a pilot.

“Yes, General,” he replies definitively, voice confident.

BB-8 beeps a string of two-pitched exclamations. Finn looks over to Poe, who sits grinning gleefully and whispers something to BB-8.

When Finn looks back at the General, she is smiling too, a quiet smile filled with warmth and gratitude.

“Congratulations, Officer,” she says, still smiling.

“While you rehabilitate, I may assign members of Blue and Rapier Squadron for you to instruct, if that is something you won’t mind. Legend has it that you’re proficient in quite a large number of forms of hand-to-hand combat, and—” for a moment, her smile becomes a grin.

“—and members of our Starfighter Corps are sorely lacking in their defensive maneuvers once on solid ground.”

“She’s talking about Testor,” Poe says, almost to himself, shaking his head ruefully.

“I am,” the General confirms, and with that, she walks out of the medical ward, the door hissing closed quietly behind her.

There is time for Finn to take a single breath of relief.

Poe leaps up from the chair with a contained whoop. “Finn, you’re—”

“Yeah, I’m—” Finn cuts into Poe’s exclamation, voice equally bright as realization starts to set in.

Their voices rise in an indiscernible crescendo of celebration, of joy, of realization. A culmination of emotions, of stories, of experiences otherwise unspoken.

“Congratulations, Finn,” Poe manages finally. “It’s all you.”

  
  


“Ah, _Ren_ ,” Snoke’s voice is deep and reverberating, despite the flickering hologram of his ghastly appearance on the dark throne.

Kylo Ren kneels pitifully in front of the apparition, lowering his helmeted head.

“I am certain that General Hux has informed you of our _situation_.” Snoke’s lip curls at the word, and the clacks of his long, filthy fingernails against the armrests of the throne are audible even through the hologram. “But I am sure you were aware of it yourself.”

He takes a rasping breath, and Kylo Ren bends closer to the ground.

“ _Your ground troops, obliterated. Your base erased from existence. And you—_ ”

Snoke’s wavering face sneers in contempt as the regulated hiss of Kylo Ren's breathing ceases.

“—finally given the opportunity, _deserving the privilege_ to wear the mask like your predecessor once did.”

The silence that follows amplifies the implication of Snoke’s previous words, laced with the Supreme Leader’s unquestioned power and the tangible waves of Kylo Ren’s fear.

“How long until the remaining troops aboard the Star Destroyers and accompanying starfighter squadrons can be mobilized to one location?”

“One week, Supreme Leader,” Kylo Ren’s voice crackles out through the mask.

“Good.” Snoke sits back on his throne, filling up even more of the room. “ _He is awake_.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Extending my wholehearted thanks to my beta reader, Oz, with who I saw Episode VIII on opening night and was able to share my immediate impressions. And also a big thank you to the employees of the diner where I waited before opening night, given that I apparently saw the film in an separate dimension where no other establishment looked anywhere close to occupied by humans. Or by anyone, really. But rats off to the man checking our tickets in Stormtrooper armor. 
> 
> Thank you to everyone leaving kudos and comments!! Seeing notifications for them and reading your reactions is honestly the best feeling.


	3. Chapter 3

Rey spends the first night in one of the island’s stone huts, in the same small cluster of huts on the island’s plateau as the hut that Master Skywalker occupies. The Caretakers beckon her into the hut without speaking, bring her two torches and a heavy clay jug of water. 

It is strange, lying on the rock with her jacket spread out beneath her. 

Beside her lies the blaster that Han Solo entrusted her with, the power pack charged and installed but the safety on. Her staff lies at the foot of her makeshift bed. 

It is suddenly empty without the presence of the lightsaber, something she'd gotten used to always having about her, somewhere on her person, the week that she’d stayed on D’Qar. 

She misses its constancy. 

The two torches hang from alcoves on the opposite sides of the metal door, providing flickering light. Her attention flickers unsteadily with them, on the brink of sleep, between an overwhelmingly acute perception of her surroundings, and Finn. 

Finn. In deep, artificial sleep as his back knits itself together.

_“I’ll come back for you, I promise,” Rey says, and kisses Finn—unconscious but stable, healing Finn—on the forehead._

And she knows she won’t need any tracker or other dangerous, technological appliance because she’s got the Force, and Finn’s presence in the Force is distinct, constant. She knows she can find her way back to him with her eyes closed.

She falls asleep uneasily, her thoughts washing back and forth through her head to the distant sound of waves. 

 

Luke sees Chewbacca through the foliage, sitting in front of a small, smoldering fire just beyond the overhang of the Falcon. Chewie crunches dismally on what Luke can only assume is porg bone, periodically punctuating the gnashing with soft whimpers. 

He’d offered Chewie a place to stay in another hut, as he’d offered Rey, but Chewie had refused with a stubborn gurgle and abrupt departure, favoring to remain on the Falcon. 

The Falcon holds enough room to sleep them all and the entire Caretaker population of the island, but it also holds memories. Memories Chewie is not ready to part with. 

They pull painfully on Luke’s heartstrings, too. 

His cloak around his shoulders, Luke walks carefully through the tall grass, stilling every blade. Chewie doesn’t turn, even though Luke has the feeling that Chewie knows that he is there. In a way, Luke is thankful to him for it. 

He isn’t sure that he wants to be seen, either. 

He mounts the familiar sloped gangway of the Millennium Falcon for the first time in nearly fifteen years. 

It is so familiar, yet the present lies so dissonant from the memories of the past. 

Luke stops just through the gangway. The memories are stifling, laden with the pain of knowing that Han is dead.

Gone.

His body split into trillions of atoms and absorbed to be part of an expanding sun. 

Luke wipes the tears off of his face with a weathered hand. It is suitable, in a way. 

The second sun. 

So many painful years ago, Aunt Beru had told him, when he’d still been small enough to hang from a baby sling on his aunt’s back and reach for mushrooms growing on moisture vaporators, that balanced things in the universe always came in twos. 

A brother and a sister, meant to shoulder the burden of saving the galaxy. A master and an apprentice. A lord and an acolyte. 

“And fate always comes in threes,” she’d told him, as they shielded their eyes from the blazing light of the two suns to watch Uncle Owen make his way across the farm. “That’s why there’s three of us, Luke. You, me, and your Uncle Owen.” 

The interior of the Falcon is dark, the overhead lights off and the lights along the control panels on the walls dim. 

The hallway is just like he remembers it to be, whether fifteen years or thirty years ago. The padding still has the indescribable atmosphere of familiarity and comfort. 

Luke can feel Jakku’s stifling heat, trapped, embedded in the frame of the Falcon. Now a part of it forever, or the forever until the ship finally rattles apart. 

Luke can still feel the memories that echo through its corridors. 

It hurts, it aches where he can’t reach, where he can’t dull the pain. 

His feet lead him to the cockpit unbidden, along corridors he could have walked through with closed eyes. Trailing a path so familiar and reflexive that he finds himself standing in the doorway before he can spare it a thought. 

The console is dark, too, buttons scratched, dented, and miserable when examined in the half-light of the solitary moon. 

Luke runs his hand across the controls and the cockpit lights flicker on, drenching everything around him in blinding, cold reality. 

His eyes skitter around the cockpit and he blinks the ghosts away. 

There is a glittering above the windshield that catches his eye, and he stretches his hand out towards it. Walks closer, takes the objects in his hand and brings them towards his face. 

Dice. 

Two gold-plated dice, hanging from a thin, delicate chain. 

Dice, who by some miracle managed to remain where they’d been hung forty years prior, despite Han selling the ship and abandoning it on Jakku. 

Dice whose story Luke knows well enough to tell as his own. 

The dice with which Han had won the Millennium Falcon from Lando Calrissian. 

The pain is too heavy to keep himself upright against, too much to fight, and he collapses into the copilot’s seat. 

The filthy seat covers contain an additional fifteen years of dust. 

He sits and listens to the creaking of the ship and the howling of the wind, the kind of howling that meant that rain was eminent later in the night. He’d spent enough nights, far too many, awake on Ahch-to to know. 

The dice jingle above his head like a memory just out of reach. 

He looks up at them from where he sits, suddenly only a small, hunched old man, and looks at them until his eyes sting. 

Resolutely, he struggles up and slips the dice off of their hook, curls them into his palm, protective, away from the rest of the galaxy. 

The lights of the cockpit blink and flash out as he stumbles away. 

For one night, he can be nothing greater than a miserable old man with a hole the size of a star system in his heart. 

Or maybe that had been all he was, for all of the years he’d hidden himself away instead of standing, despite the shame, to face his failure. 

He walks down the corridor, footsteps soft and silent, relearning the way the halls twine together between hatches and panels. 

Down a turn, he finds the gunner’s perch, the durasteel frame dented and oxidizing.

He descends into it carefully, and slots himself habitually into the revolving seat. From where he sits now, he has a clear view of Ahch-to’s ocean through the scuffed and scratched transparisteel. Stretching out, in a way that beckons him to fly toward the horizon for eternity. 

The moon spills its mercurial light into the water, and Luke can distinguish the dots of wave crests as the wind pulls at the current. 

The perch that Luke occupies is heavy with memories and feelings, both old and—Luke is surprised to find—new. As discernible and distinct as every clatter of each individual raindrop, of every footprint left in the dunes of a windless desert. 

Luke traces his hands along the controls of the gun and lets the memories wash over him. The newer ones stand out, light-years brighter, alive with a more vivid intensity. 

A shout. A victory. A TIE-fighter explodes against a backdrop of orange sand and blue sky. 

Luke wrenches his hands away and climbs out of the perch. 

The corridor leads back to what Han had called the communal mess, supposedly both in literary and literal terms. 

It is almost haunting, finding everything there to be exactly the same, exactly as he’d remembered. As if time had not deigned to pass at all, instead remaining trapped within the hull of the ship. Refused to keep going. 

As if once he steps back down the gangway, he'll be nineteen again, wearing stormtrooper armor and hurrying to keep up with Han. 

The same old upholstery. The same holographic game table where C-3PO had challenged Chewbacca to a game of dejarik. The same room where both Han and Obi-Wan had sat, watching him ignite the lightsaber with the blast shield over his eyes. 

He sits down heavily at the table, gazing just beyond the empty doorway. 

There is a whir from beside the upright control panel. Luke turns, searching for the source of the sound. 

With a familiar hum of shifting gears, R-2D2 rolls out towards Luke, into his line of sight. 

“R-2!” Luke can't hold back his elation, as much as it is tinged with melancholy. “What are you doing here?” 

R-2 unleashes a torrent of two-tone beeps implementing a variety of creative lexicon. 

Luke runs his hand down his face and through his beard. “I know, R-2, I know.” 

He is rebuked with more shrill beeping. 

He would be a fool not to acknowledge that everything R-2 angrily spits at him is true. 

Once R-2 is satisfied and Luke’s only response is silent agreement, R-2 rolls back slightly, a little farther away from the table at which Luke sits. 

Luke looks up. 

There is clicking from inside R-2 as several internal mechanisms reset, and a blue hologram projection flickers to life in front of Luke. 

She is young, clothed in white with dark hair framing her face. Her expression is resolute, determined. Composed. Her voice is steady, full of urgency. 

_Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope._

Luke glances at R-2 as the recording breaks up and loops, but he doesn't have the energy to glower. 

“Of course I'll help her, R-2. I couldn't face myself if I turned her away, if I did it again.”

 

 

Finn wakes to peaceful silence.

The light that washes over him through the slats across his bunk's window is that of D'Qar's brilliant sun.

_Artificial fluorescent panels that flicker frantically and buzz._

The air is sweet and clean, that of D’Qar’s trees.

_Recycled oxygen circulating through the bunks aboard the Finalizer._

Finn breathes.

He dresses slowly, takes the time to examine the clothing, soft, loose, and catalogue its feeling against his skin. The rustle of the fabric as he moves is uncharacteristic, and it registers as a buzz in his senses at the back of his mind.

Poe’s jacket—Finn’s jacket—glows almost golden in the sunlight from where he’d hung it carefully on a hook above his bunk. He traces the line of thick blue leather cord that runs along the jacket's spine, feeling that same tingle against his own back. He slips the jacket on against the chill.

He cannot gauge the time of day on D’Qar when he’d woken; the slats on the windows of his bunk let in the sun, but it says nothing of its position or the amount of activity on base. He listens intently, but there is only quiet and the gentle rustle of the wind.

The pneumatic door of his bunk hisses open quietly, and Finn pads out into the corridor. It is quiet and devoid of organic life.

Something bumps against his right leg. Finn looks down, surprised, and finds BB-8’s metal body whirring beside his shin.

BB-8 beeps at him inquisitively.

Finn shakes his head. “I’m still in the dark about that, sorry,” he says softly, crouching down to be level with BB-8’s ocular sensor. Absentmindedly, he runs his hand over its durasteel exterior, tweaking the position of its transceiver.

Still crouching, he maneuvers himself against the wall of the corridor, slotting himself at the meeting of the wall and the floor and leaning back, as far as possible, careful not to bump his back against the wall. BB-8 rolls closer.

He isn’t sure what he should do. He hadn't gone out with a clear direction, a clear purpose in mind.

“Hey, BB-8, do you happen to know if there’s a training complex on D’Qar?” he asks suddenly, quietly.

BB-8 beeps excitedly, and Finn is stuck between shushing him again and shaking his head.

BB-8 whirs, rolling back and forth in place in the mechanical imitation of thoughtful fidgeting. Finn lets his eyes roam around the hall, curious.

Something within BB-8 clicks, and its holographic projector whirs to life. BB-8 projects a two-dimensional, flickering, blue map of the base above Finn’s head and beeps to get Finn’s attention.

As Finn watches, a small, glowing line traces around the base, presumably from the point where he and BB-8 sit, to the base’s training complex. He studies the map, memorizing the turns. Forward, left, forward, right, right, forward, stairs—down, and left.

Finn rubs BB-8’s headplate again gently. “Thank you.”

He hoists himself back up along the wall and sets off quietly, BB-8’s whirs fading away.

 

He finds the training complex more easily than he'd expected, maneuvering through corridors as unobtrusively as possible, drawing as little attention as he can. He does not pass a lot of people along his way, but those that do walk by look at him with a kind of awe that he is not used to, is not sure what to do with.

He hurries along, trying to look purposeful and determined. To look like the hero that people were taking him to be.The training complex is empty when he gets there.

The floor covered with firm mats, a thick metal door separating it from the rest of that hallway in the sector. He takes off his shoes upon entry and leaves them by the wall, feeling the mats under his feet through his socks.

Two of the walls of the complex are transparisteel, but Finn doesn’t mind so much. The smell of the mats is calming, the spring of the floor something to which he has grown accustomed. The particular sector of the base where the training complex is located attracts no traffic.

He rotates his arms as gently as possible, unused to performing his rudimentary warm-up complexes without someone’s close, berating scrutiny.

He breathes and practices kicks, stretching his legs and feeling the rotation in his ankles. Makes his way around the room.

Practices punches, throwing them at large, trooper-esque shapes clothed haphazardly in white plastisteel armor. Practices jabs with elbows, hands, knees.

He finds an imitation of an extendable baton and swings it around, feeling the familiar weight in his hand and the pressure that the movement exerts on his back.

When he stops, sliding down against the far wall to a squat, he is not short of breath, but beads of sweat dot his temples and weigh down his eyelids. He fights the familiarity, fights the memories that struggle to surface and make his throat close up.

There is a knock on the transparisteel wall by the metal door, jarring Finn out of his thoughts.

Poe waves from the other side of the wall, gestures to the door, and mouths what looks vaguely like, “Can I come in?”

Finn nods, hoping Poe sees it from across the room, and the door of the complex swings open, revealing Poe and another person that Finn recognizes as a Blue Squadron pilot.

It is strange to see them both in loose white and gray civvies, out of their bright orange flight uniforms, and it helps break the torrent of memories.

“Hey,” Poe says, shifting from foot to foot once he crosses over onto the mats that line the floor. “I- sorry for barging in, distracting you. We can leave if you want—”

“No, no, of course not,” Finn waves him off, crossing the room towards them, swallowing his ricocheting heart. “How did you figure out I was here?”

Poe looks even more sheepish. “BB-8 told me.” BB-8’s white ionoxium bodice peeks out from behind Poe’s legs. “I thought about what the General said, with Testor and the rest of the squadron, and well, we had the morning relatively free...” he trails off.

The woman beside him sticks out a hand towards Finn, which Finn takes and shakes. Her grip is sure and firm, her hands calloused.

“I’m Jess. Jess Pava." She flashes him a brilliant grin. "You probably know me from whatever horrible things Dameron has told you about me. Like that time I went on the mission to Ovanis by his personal request, or that time we flew to Megalox Beta—”

“Yeah, alright, Testor,” says Poe distractedly, turning back to Finn. “I saw some of your practice, and I was wondering—”

“Sure, sure,” Finn says, a little too quickly. He steps back slightly, and rocks to and fro from his heels to his toes. “I, well- is there anything specific you’d like me too- you want to talk about?”

“Defensive strikes, probably,” Jessika Pava says honestly, before Poe can mumble out something else, hopping on the balls of her feet. “I know I don’t do very well with those, and I rather dislike what comes after I lose.”

Finn sucks in a breath and holds it, thinking. “Well, here’s what I can try to do. You know ICE? The standardized Imperial combat exercises that all stormtroopers practice? I can show you—both of you—how they work in practice. I can tell you how the moves work and how to recognize them, and what you can do to block them and counter. Especially when you’re working against the heavy plastisteel armor when on the ground.”

Poe frowns, looking visibly uncomfortable. “You’re sure about this?” he asks finally.

“Yeah,” Finn replies, much too quickly again, and steps back a little bit more. “Here, Poe, if you could stand a little more to the side, so that- that Jessika can see both of us. Alright, okay good. Now here, take these.”

Finn hands two thick, flat gloves to Poe, who tugs them on. Finn shakes out his arms, bounces in place, as Poe fastens the straps of his right glove with his teeth.

“Hold these up, about shoulder level. That’s good. Now relax your shoulders and your torso. Bend your knees. Okay.”

Finn gauges the distance approximately, and steps back three steps. “Here. I’m going to move and kick, and I want both of you to watch my feet and how I step. Don’t look at my face—watch my legs. And don’t lower your hands.” 

Finn moves at maybe a fifth of the speed he’d move during standard practice, taking the time to line up his kick. He starts with his left foot forward, rotating his shoulders, then his torso, unbending his right leg and letting it trace an arc up to where it gently hits the gloves that Poe holds out by his chest. 

“Alright. I’m going to do different kicks now, with different legs. I want you to notice the differences between the way I stand, and where the kick lands in relation to Poe. Poe, here’s the sequence: I’m going to do a torso kick, left leg, then shoulder-height, right, then up towards your face, right. Then I’m going to do a knee jab up, left, then from the side, left. I’m not going to land any of them, but try to catch them in the gloves.” 

Finn moves through the routine, feeling Poe and Jessika’s eyes follow the sequence. When he comes to the end of the sequence, Poe steps back and shakes out his arms, undoubtedly starting to get sore from being up by his chest, encumbered by the weight of the gloves. Jess, who’d settled down onto the mat and watched from the floor, leans forward and ties up her hair. 

Finn beckons her up to replace Poe opposite him. “Can you show me the defense you’ve learned?” 

Poe shifts over to the side as Jessika pulls herself up. She rotates her shoulders, suddenly unsure. 

Finn redistributes his weight, into formation for a punch. He extends a hand, incredibly slowly, letting her watch his right arm as it moves towards her. He pauses, hand hovering. 

“What would you do to block something like this?” 

Jess fidgets. Hesitantly, she reaches her right hand up and closes it around his fist. 

“Not bad,” says Finn unconvincingly, as he carefully steps in, moves around her and pulls her right arm behind her back. 

“Try blocking it with your left forearm instead,” he suggests, moving back to where he’d been as Jess twists around. 

She does. “Great. You’re catching on. Now, your right arm is free. You can punch the stomach, or you can pull out a blaster and shoot somewhere.” 

She does as he suggests, tapping his sternum lightly with her right hand. 

They do this for a while, Finn switching Poe and Jess out as he explains, demonstrates kicks and punches, where they fall and how to block them. 

Poe settles into the rhythm of shifting his hands to meet Finn’s blows, as Finn works on kicks out of sequence. Poe’s still caught off guard sometimes, but his blocks become more reflexive as he concentrates on how Finn moves. 

Finn corrects their contact positions, helping them levy their punches and kicks around imagined gaps in imagined plate armor. 

“How do you do that so naturally,” Jess complains, huffing defeatedly from the mat as Finn catches what has to be Poe's three-hundredth kick under his left arm. 

Finn wants to say practice, years and years and childhoods worth of unrelenting, unforgiving training, but he doesn’t. 

“I’m not sure. You get used to it, I think—the way you react, it becomes a part of you. It’s a _feeling._ ” 

 

The wind is unceasing, and it buffets them both, pulling hungrily at their clothes and their hair, dousing them in mist from the crashing waves against the rocks below. 

Rey sits on the slab of rock, on the overhang beyond the cavern, and Luke stands beside her at the cliff’s edge. 

The sunlight warms her to the marrow of her bones. The heat is so _familiar_. Even now, there is an aching in her heart, a voice that tells her, _you should have stayed_. She pushes it away. 

Luke reaches down and picks up Rey’s staff, which she’d placed to the side of the the rock slab. 

Carefully, he sets it onto the rock in front of her, in the place where the legacy lightsaber had rested the previous day. 

“Controlling minds and making rocks float,” he says quietly, almost to himself, almost jovially. “Well, you've had practice with that, haven't you?” 

He runs a hand along the staff, feeling the individual weight of every metal component, intricately connected. “You're exceedingly familiar with this staff, yes?” 

Rey nods, watching him carefully. 

Luke takes his hand away and steps back from the rock. “Can you make it float?” 

Rey takes a deep breath. The staff wobbles on the rock and rises up, until it is suspended at eye level in front of Rey, floating between them. 

Luke examines the staff, watching as the metal glistens in the sunlight. 

“You've used this staff for the better part of your life,” Luke says. It isn't as much of a question as it is an affirmation. “I do not doubt that you are the one who built it.” 

A stronger gust of wind billows through the cavern, and the staff jostles as the wind momentarily breaks Rey’s concentration. 

“Focus,” Luke says quietly. Despite the unrelenting wind, the staff stills. 

“Now,” he says, as Rey’s brow creases from the continual concentration. “You've put this staff together—I want you to take it apart. Piece by piece, just as carefully as you put it together when you built it.” 

A range of emotions flashes across Rey’s face, and the staff careens wildly. 

"What if I drop it?" she stammers out first, her focus split between keeping the staff aloft and discerning how to execute Luke's request.

"If I drop a part of it?” she amends, trying to explain her qualms in short sentence fragments. “It'll fall into the water." 

Luke leans over the side of the cliff and peers down into the churning white froth, as if contemplating the conundrum. The wind whips back his graying hair as he turns back around towards Rey. 

"Well, I'm here, aren't I?" 

The lines across Rey's brow deepen.

"Or you'll have to dive and get them out yourself," he suggests nonchalantly, and the staff dips so hard that an end slams against the flat rock, filling the wind with a dissonant ringing. 

For a brief moment, the wind stills, and an eerie silence presses on their ears. 

Rey sets her shoulders and closes her eyes. 

The staff remains aloft, rotating slowly, glistening with water droplets from the ocean’s spray. 

An infinitesimal movement. The very last piece begins to swivel, turning round and round with the utmost precision. As it detaches, it floats barely a hair’s breadth away from the staff itself, quivering slightly, as if an invisible string had been pulled taught between it and the staff. 

The staff comes apart screw by screw. Beads of sweat slide down Rey’s temples and the nape of her neck as she perches on the rock, every muscle in her body rigid and every breath she blows out barely a hiss through her clenched teeth. 

The sky is clear, betraying no signs of the rainstorm in the night. The mist glitters in iridescent colors as the sunlight filters through the droplets of water. 

The quarterstaff hangs suspended in the air, pulled apart into individual pieces. A whole, visible through each of its parts. 

The wind blowing through the cavern is barely a breeze. 

Rey opens her eyes, just in time to see the amazement written across Luke Skywalker’s face. 

And there is something else, too. Cleverly masked but still all too easy to find. 

Pride.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for a day's delay; impromptu travel. Apparently being a magnet for strange experiences, I had my fill.
> 
> Thank you so much for sticking around.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I keep posting late, falling behind, and I apologize.
> 
> Should be back to regularly scheduled programming next week, when I switch time zones again and stop sleeping.

Rey rises with the first of the two suns, but she is still too late to catch Luke Skywalker before he is gone that morning along his habitual route circling the island.

It is still twilight, the sky gray before the second dawn, and the Caretaker population is not yet awake to murmur in tandem with the susurrus of the waves. As the halo of the second sun breaks the horizon, Rey slings her staff across her back and steps out onto the plateau, following the movement of the wind.

She sets out along a footpath uphill, following the path she assumes Luke Skywalker is prone to taking, letting it lead her, guide her around the island.

The footpath runs along the green cliff’s edge along the circumference of the island, and Rey watches the choppy waves spike and flatten, frothing at the tops.

Their constant, hypnotizing movement reminds her of dunes, how they shifted every night on Jakku.

Except compared to the dynamism of the water, dunes are waves that make their way across the desert over thousands of years, trapped in the lethargy, encumbered by the hot, heavy air that presses on them and makes them compliant to sloth.

The ocean spray gathers on her eyelashes, and she periodically blinks it away, letting it dust her cheeks. She can taste the salt on her tongue.

As she walks along the edge, unable to resist the entrancing shifting of the waves, a glimmer impossible to attribute to the path that the rising second sun shines across the water catches her eye. She stops, brushes strands of hair pulled loose from her ties out of her face to look closer. 

Despite the ripples and the murkiness of the water, there is no mistaking the hull of a sunken starfighter.

Rey stares at it as its transparisteel cockpit catches the light of the sun, glinting playfully.

An Incom T-65 X-wing, out of production for thirty years, if not more.

She contemplates it as she listens to the gurgle of the waves against the sheer rock face below her. If she reaches far enough, deep enough, she feels that she will hear its history.

Hitching her staff up higher onto her back, she keeps walking, following the path as it runs away from the ocean and leads inland, to the center of the island. It becomes less well-worn, fresh green grass shoots rustling against her feet as she climbs uphill. The trail is sloping, and she walks slowly, purposefully, carefully finding traction against the grass and dust.

Cresting the hill, she emerges onto the highest point of the island. Buffeted on all sides by the enduring wind. The view is gorgeous, the ocean shimmering out on all sides around her, the deep blue shades darker than the blue of the endless sky.

From where she stands, she can see the Falcon on one side of the island. On the other, the Village of the Lanai, protected from the waves by the bones from the ribcage of a massive sea creature's carcass.

Beyond that, along the cliffs of the island’s northernmost jetty, she sees the gray robe of Luke Skywalker as he slowly makes his way around the island, a large pack slung over his shoulder.

As Rey watches, shielding her eyes from the glistening of the water and the glare of the suns, he breaks into a run, vaulting over a sheer drop between two cliff faces on a long, jagged fishing spear.

Rey turns back inland, facing the wind, and spots what has to be the heart of the island.

The ancient uneti tree.

She breaks into a light jog, slipping and sliding slightly in the dew still clinging to the grass as she makes her way downhill, toward the ancient obelisk. Small shards of rock skitter beneath her feet and she struggles to keep her footing.

She skids to a stop by the base of the tree. Pauses to examine, run her fingers along the grooves and knots along the trunk as she’d done in her vision. Almost involuntarily, she closes her eyes.

The entrance, a massive hollow, beckons her with the whispers of forgotten voices. They yearn.

Slowly, carefully, she steps inside.

The Temple is dark, rays of light pouring in only through small separations in the intertwining wood of the trunk. She steps forward, farther into the tree, and in doing so, looks down at the ground under her feet.

Though she knows she is standing on soft earth—she can feel it through the soles of her boots—the ground dissolves into nothingness; leaves her floating above oblivion. She catches her breath.

On the other side of the chasm, there is a shelf, an indent carved directly out of the wood, on which eight volumes rest. Still bound by cloth, covers of wood and leather, with a starbird emblazoned on each spine.

Their weight—their presence—is familiar.

She steps haltingly across the nothingness, fighting the tricks that it plays on her mind, and reaches one hand out. To touch. To feel.

“You’ve seen this place.”

Rey turns, startled, the sharp movement disturbing the languid particles of dust, to see Luke Skywalker silhouetted against the opening in the tree and surrounding blue sky at the entrance to the Temple.

His pack is slung across his shoulders, a large fish tied to the bulk of the pack with cord. It brings the reek of brine into the Temple, but he does not seem to mind.

“In dreams,” she replies honestly. “Just as I’ve seen what’s below.”

“The Sacred Texts,” Luke Skywalker says, gesturing with his eyes at Rey's outstretched hand.

Rey feels the creaking of the uneti tree all around her. Still alive despite the massive, gaping hollowness within.

“They are over a thousand years old, yet they have dictated the ways of the Jedi for millenia, unchanged.” Luke’s voice is filled with disdain. “Can you sense what _arrogance_ the Jedi needed to possess in order to believe that their codes could not grow outdated, be subject to change, as the universe shifted so drastically around them?”

He scoffs, running his hand along the wood of the hollow, smoothed by centuries of wind unceasing in might.

“There is nothing written in those texts that will be of value to you, that you do not already know.”

Rey retracts her hand, steps back across the chasm.

“What is found _below_?"

“The opposite.” Luke heaves a sigh and shifts, redistributing the weight of his pack. “The surplus of knowledge—the opposite of the Jedi’s ignorance. All of our suspicions, our fears, not yet come to fruition. Ones that maybe never will.”

A strong gust of wind shakes the tree to its roots.

“Everything you fear.”

Rey is suddenly acutely aware of every breath she takes.

“Everything you bring in, you will find there.”

She stands, unsure, beside Luke by the entrance to the Temple.

He reaches into his robes and pulls out the lightsaber, holds it out to her. Presses it into her hands.

“Take it. Take it with you to the cavern.” He looks at the bodice. For once, his expression is unreadable. “You may need it.”

By the time she clips the lightsaber to her belt, he is gone.

 

She crouches by the gaping hole, knees and palms pressing into the rough seaweed that bleeds around its edge. Here, the sound of the waves is sharp, harsh. She sets her staff down and, bracing herself, looks over the edge.

The rupture in the earth beckons her, whispers like hisses that slice through the moisture-laden air like blades, their own kind of greedy beckoning.

Below her, Rey can only see inky water. The longer she listens, the more they sound like the voices of people she can pretend to remember.

She leans even further over the edge.

A geyser of freezing water erupts through the opening, dousing Rey’s face, her shoulders. Throwing her off balance, her hands losing traction.

Pulls her back through the opening along with it as it falls back into the depths of the ocean.

Disoriented, unable to breathe. Dropping like a stone into the water below her.

It swallows her whole, pulling her in over her head.

The cold constricts her windpipe, locks her muscles and makes movement excruciating. Any breath she tries to take fills her nose and mouth with the same ice-cold water, freezes her lungs.

It is the same kind of suffocating she’d felt when Kylo Ren tried to force his way into her mind.

She flounders, kicking, splashing wildly, until her feet hit the bottom and she realizes that the cove is shallow. She pushes off and breaks the surface, gulping mouthfuls of damp air. Coughing, spitting, trying to breathe. 

She hangs in the water.

Rubbing the stinging salt water from her eyes with her fingers, she spots land—black rock that juts out into the cove, like a continuation of the cave walls that seeps into the water, and kicks towards it, intermittently pulling herself forward with strokes of her arms.

The black rock is slick with ocean mist. It takes a great deal of effort for Rey to pull herself up onto it, her fingers slipping and struggling to find purchase, her muscles trembling with the effort, arms uncooperative. The effort leaves her heaving, her fingers and forearms raw.

Rolling onto the rock, exhausted, Rey realizes that her staff is not with her; not slung onto her back—she’d left it by the blowhole where she set it down in order to look further over the edge.

Now, she has only Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber, still clipped securely to her belt.

Flat on her back, she looks up at the ceiling, covered in tapering mineral deposits that hang like jagged teeth. The cavern is massive, a hollow in the bedrock, the foundation of the island. A cavity.

Slowly, eyeing her surroundings, she rolls over, pulling herself up first onto her hands and knees before she can stand up.

The air churns with clouds of vapor, milky white against the smooth black rock. The effect is the opposite of the one created in the Jedi Temple—her surroundings are almost too clear, too real for comfort. Just like the cold, cold ocean.

Her robes are drenched to the last thread, and they weigh her down, push to buckle her legs and collapse them out from under her. The icy water against her skin seeps beneath it.

It is like the cold in the water and the air yearns to siphon the last of Jakku’s heat from her heart.

The shifting mist spills from a wall of translucent ice before her, cloudy, its insides shifting in a way that makes her bones grate against each other in discomfort.

Her breaths puff out in white clouds of vapor, the chill stinging her nose.

She walks towards the milky ice, carefully finding her footing on the slippery rock. As she gets closer, the smoke within the ice begins to shift more intensely. Magnetizing.

She halts, an arm’s reach from the wall of ice.

It is without warning. A hole rips open in her chest, filling with fear and loathing as she recognizes the face that looms out of the darkness.

She opens her mouth to scream, but the surrounding silence swallows the noise.

“Filthy, murderous scum,” she manages, and the lightsaber that Luke Skywalker had given her flies to her hands from her belt and ignites. The light chases away the darkness, backs the shadows into the corners of her vision.

The ghost of Kylo Ren looks vacantly past her. Through her.

Her teeth chatter, rattling in her skull.

“Do you know _why_ I left the Temple?” asks the apparition, and its voice is horrible, recognizable. Real.

Rey screams to drown it out, a feral cry as she slashes out at the insubstantial form with the lightsaber.

The light passes straight through the wall, and the mist simply shifts and reforms.

“Has Skywalker told you?” the apparition insists.

“He told me the truth,” Rey grits out, desperate, even though Luke Skywalker has told her nothing about the fall of Ben Organa.

“No, he hasn’t,” says the apparition, coldly, without feeling, and the words turn Rey’s blood to ice, tearing at her veins.

Kylo Ren’s face, as she knows it, as she’d seen it when she’d torn it open with the lightsaber she now holds in her hands, in retribution for Finn, for Han Solo, fades into the darkness, instead replaced by darkness fractured by torchlight.

She is in a sleeping chamber.

Ben Organa, half the age she knows him by, only so many moons younger than she is now, lies asleep on a mattress. Gone are the scar, the hatred.

Rey levels the lightsaber.

There is green. Oh, there is green, green like she'd never seen before, that shines from somewhere above him and bathes him in the ghost of its light. Involuntarily, Rey looks upward, searching for the source.

The eidolon of Luke Skywalker, larger than life, looms over his bed. Green lightsaber raised.

There is the unreadable look in his eyes.

He brings the lightsaber down.

“LIAR!” Rey screams, and her voice shatters the mirage into hundreds of thousands of individual moments, into oblivion.

“He hasn’t told you.”

Rey screams again, because the figure of Kylo Ren has materialized beside her. She slices out, blindly, but the apparition dissolves to take shape just out of reach.

How she yearns for her staff.

“That isn’t true,” she insists again, brandishing the lightsaber in a wide arc in front of her.

“You don’t know that.” The voice of the apparition crackles, distorted by the helmet that billows out of the smoke and spreads across its face. “He didn’t think I was worth saving. He saw the darkness within me, and he would not help me.”

She fights it, fights to stay grounded in reality. Whatever reality she is facing, she is living.

“What about your father?” Tears prickle at the backs of her eyes, hot, turning her eyes red and making her vision swim. “He _loved_ you. He believed he could bring you back. He tried to save you. Did he deserve it?”

The apparition ignites its lightsaber. Red, with its twin-blade crossguard, filling the cavern with its volatile crackling.

Rey slashes out and meets the red blade, and her arms tremble from the unstable vibration of the lightsaber. “Maybe it was too late for you then, if it was too late for you when _your father_ begged for you to come back,” she grits out.

“It was never too late for him to save _you_.”

Rey’s breath catches in her throat. Her surroundings seem to crumble into that same smoke.

She slices upward and out, the same way she’d done in the forest on Starkiller, and Kylo Ren’s mask splits open. He falls, his body dissolving into billowing gray.

The helmet skitters across the black rock and skids to a stop in front of Rey’s feet. She lowers her eyes down to look at it, breathing heavily.

Through the splintering faceguard, her own blue eyes stare out, unmoving.

Rey chokes, staggers back, and falls into the water.

 

She wakes up floating above the blowhole, and catches herself against the thick seaweed before she can fall back through the opening.

The skin of her palms breaks open as she pulls herself up out of the hole, breathing ragged.

Red blood flows freely but thinly, weakly, from her hands. She breaks into a run towards the cluster of huts on the plateau.

 

Heavy clouds hang low and static in the sky, and rain streaks past her as she runs, painting the footpath even more treacherous. The Lanai dart out of her way as she veers to avoid them, slows to a stop in front of Luke Skywalker’s hut.

She means to shout, to bang on the thick metal door.

Instead, when she stretches out her hand, the hut flies apart. Blows apart into individual stone bricks.

Luke Skywalker turns as the hut tears apart around him.

“Did you forsake him?” she demands, because she is struck by the realization, by the _dread_ that she does not know.

“That remains your greatest fear,” Luke says, unshakable, gazing through the debris into Rey’s frenzied eyes. “Abandonment.”

The hut collapses around him.

Luke Skywalker reaches up, cradling his face in his hands. He takes a shuddering breath, and Rey pauses, taken aback. Watching. “The fault is mine.”

He picks his way over the debris, stopping before Rey.

“Come with me.”

 

Luke’s strides are wide, purposeful, and he moves quickly. Rey struggles to keep up, fighting the wind that picks up and lashes large droplets of rain across her face. Gone is the sunny, familiar weather of the morning. The ocean below them is gray, and it dissolves into the overhanging clouds, swallowing the horizon.

The water erupting out of the blowhole rises up to meet them, and Rey halts beside Luke at the lip, the seaweed shifting beneath her weight.

As the water subsides, Luke kneels down and picks up Rey’s staff, silent, and wordlessly holds it out to her.

Rey looks down at her palms, still smeared with blood, and washes them hastily in the rainwater before taking her staff back. The metal is cool against her raw, prickling hands, and the weight of the staff is comforting as she slings it over her shoulders.

She unclips the lightsaber from her belt and holds it back out to him. He looks at it, contemplative, before taking it and stowing it in his robe.

Rey dives into the water without hesitation, prepared now for the freezing, suffocating feeling that envelops her. When she surfaces, gasping, her staff pressing into her shoulders, she sees Luke.

He is hovering, the water dancing below his feet. A beacon, blotting out the gray sky visible through the fracture in the cavern ceiling above her.

The water freezes, and, in the blink of an eye, stills. Calm rippling out across the cove from where Luke hovers, suspended above the surface.

He lowers himself to its surface, and the water rolls out from where he stands.

He begins to walk, towards the black rock, his ragged shoes glancing off of the surface of the water.

Rey flounders, watching, before hastily kicking after him, her splashing the only movement across the glassy, unmoving water.

She hoists herself onto the rock beside Luke.

The opaque mist seethes and swirls around them both as they stand before the towering wall of ice in the cavern, dwarfed by its magnitude.

“There is darkness within all of us,” says Luke, his hands stowed inside the sleeves of his robe. “It has the capacity to tell truth, if you are willing to accept it. Unlike the light, the darkness will always reveal everything, _bare_ everything. Never hide or mask feelings. Never let them dissipate. The danger is in amplifying them, spinning them out of proportion.”

A Temple emerges out of the mist. Rey blinks against the inkling of a memory. 

“Fourteen years ago, Ben Organa fled the Praxeum. He was turned.” 

The Temple dissolves back into turbulent smoke. 

“When I discovered the extent of the influence of the darkness, how he’d shifted the balance within himself to favor it, I was lost. I was ashamed, that I’d let the darkness build and grow and looked past it, tricked myself into thinking that nothing was wrong.” 

Luke’s voice breaks. 

“He was my sister’s son. My nephew. He was my family. And I failed him.” He takes a shuddering breath. Beside him, Rey shivers involuntarily, partly from the cold and partly from the chill of hearing Luke Skywalker acknowledge Kylo Ren for who he had been, hear the mighty Luke Skywalker acknowledge his legacy. 

“First and foremost, I failed, and my failure, my pride, led to the deaths of countless other.” 

Rey watches the Temple as it burns, clouds of noxious smoke coughing into the sky and seeping into the red clouds of dusk like poison. 

“Five years after Ben Organa turned, after he fled the Temple, Praxeum fell.” Luke addresses the black rock beneath his feet. 

“He fled the Temple once he realized that I knew. Alone, younger and much, much less powerful than he claims to be now, he was incapable of damage, and stole away during the night. The only person that he came across that night was me.” 

Rey sees the chamber again, the figure of Luke Skywalker sitting cross-legged by candlelight. Ben Organa sleeps. 

“That night, I meditated in his room while he slept, trying to discover the source of the darkness. As I tried to discern the extent of its effect on Ben, he awoke, enraged and terrified.” Luke clasps his hands in front of him, and finally, looks up to meet Rey’s eyes. “I will never forget the look in his eyes.” 

The water sloshes against the rock in the confines of the cove. 

“I do not doubt that the darkness showed him visions, visions of me turning against him for what he, _and I_ , were afraid of finding within. He could have fled because he feared me, because he did not think that I was capable of helping him.” 

A guttural sound pierces the silence of the cavern as the blowhole jettisons a geyser of water behind them. Rey staggers forward instinctively, closer to the wall and away from the water. Luke stands fast, anchored to the rock. 

“But it does not matter now, with what Ben Organa has become. With who Kylo Ren is.” 

He steps forward as the water settles, closer and closer to the wall until he can run his fingers against the surface of the ice. 

“There is nothing left of Ben Organa within the monster of Kylo Ren.” 

Rey lets out a shaky breath, the air in front of her turning white with condensate. _The murder of Han Solo proved it._

“I knew that he would return, once he’d fled the Temple, to Snoke, but most likely in rage and seeking retribution.” Luke turns his back to the wall and looks across the cove. “So I took apart the Temple.” 

Rey walks to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Luke, looking out into the darkness with him. She cannot think of anything to say. 

“I had a number students of varying ages, but most were Ben Organa’s age.” His voice is barely above a whisper, strained and full of pain. 

“I dismissed every single student, bidding them to hide across the galaxy. I understood that Ben—Kylo—would seek them out, in order to wipe them from existence. I allowed only my oldest, strongest students, the ones that refused to leave and I believed in enough to let stay behind, stay with me protecting the Temple.” 

Luke breathes shakily. 

“As I foretold, he came back.” He takes another shuddering breath. “He came back five years after, with students of mine that I’d sent out across the galaxy to what I thought was safety, that he had sought out and twisted towards darkness. They were called the Knights of Ren.” 

Rey sees tears run down Luke Skywalker’s face. 

“The Temple fell.” 

Rey cannot resist turning back to the wall of ice. Watching the events unfold as Luke speaks them into existence. 

“Every single one of my students, those who had chosen to stand beside me and protect the Temple, were massacred.” 

The Knights of Ren sear into her mind, identical to the figures she’d seen in her vision on Takodana. 

“Hidden across the galaxy, there are only two survivors of Praxeum. Two children, who I'd separated and sent as close to nowhere as nowhere was.” 

All of a sudden, Rey sees the desert of Jakku. 

She hears herself crying, fourteen years ago. 

“Do you know who they are?” Luke asks. 

Rey feels Luke’s agony, his shame, in her bones. 

“Two children, Rey.” 

Her throat closes up. She cannot breathe. 

She is drowning, drowning in the saline water of Ahch-to’s ocean, gasping against Jakku’s winds, caught in the tempest of her emotions. 

“My niece, and my son.” 

The wall before them shows the desert of Jakku fourteen years ago, and it is blurred by her own tears. 

“The ship,” she gasps out. “The Millennium Falcon. That was why it was on Jakku, all of those years.” 

“He abandoned it there, before we parted ways.” Luke does not speak his name, but the knowledge tears at Rey’s heart. “In order for you to remain as untraceable as possible. To hide you as best as we could.” 

She wipes her eyes furiously with the heel of her hand. 

“Finn.” It is a whisper. 

“The First Order found him, almost immediately after the destruction of the Temple.” 

Rey turns to Luke and looks at him in askance, no longer caring about the tears that stream down her cheeks. She just looks, and looks, and looks. 

“The planet was annexed. He was taken, presumably with no knowledge of who he had been, and remade.” 

She cannot take it anymore, and she turns away. 

“Like you, he has no memories.” 

“And you did nothing,” Rey says quietly, to the cavern, to the island. 

“And I did nothing,” Luke repeats, echoes, and he lowers himself onto the rock. 

Rey shudders, keeling over, and crouches onto the rock beside Luke, her head against her knees, her back to the ice. 

The truth hurts. It is pain. It is fear. It is _feeling_. 

They sit, two figures curled into themselves at the base of the ice. 

"Take it." 

Rey lifts her head and sees the lightsaber. Luke Skywalker holds it out to her, his metal hand covered with frost. 

"Take it. It is no more mine than yours. It is _his_. Keep it with you. Until you can give it to him."


End file.
